Work News

I’m still wrestling with the problem of taming the department’s TODO list, and so far I haven’t decided whether or not MS Project Server is a help or a hinderance. It’s fair to say that some of us have had trouble believing that it’s a product someone would actually want to charge money for.

But it is nice being able to sit down and put together a comprehensive technical plan. It’s no secret that I’ve no time either for the vast majority of online project management tools (of which Basecamp is the poster child) nor the people that these tools are aimed at. Project management is, by necessity, a rich and detailed skill. It can be simplified to stop it becoming the Ministry for Administrative Affairs, but it can’t be glossed over. I was horrified when certain folks I’ve worked with in the past used to laugh about being unable to create project plans. I’m a great believer that if you don’t want to do the job properly (whatever your job is), get out the way and let someone else do it right instead.

And what I love about my new job is that my boss is on my back all the time to get the job done right. That’s how it should be. We’re building something special at Gradwell, and you can’t do that if things aren’t done right.

Tech News

Rather than buy a 3G iPhone, I decided to get a HTC TyTn II instead. Unlike the iPhone, it has a removable battery, and it can be used as a 3G modem by my MacBook Pro - extending the battery life of my laptop by a good 45 mins. It also has a very usable slide-out keyboard, making it very easy to use as a way to get at my email when I’m out and about.

The downside is that it runs Windows Mobile. You think Vista is bad? Windows Mobile is worse. It crashes daily, comes with the second worst browser around (Internet Explorer for Windows Mobile), and doesn’t seem to have an equivalent to Apple’s App Store. The email client is quite good - except that this week it has decided to freeze when syncing email with work’s IMAP server. Tomorrow’s job is to snag someone else’s TyTn II at work and do some testing to see whether it’s my device, or the IMAP server.

Turns out that the TyTn II is also surprisingly affordable. If you try and buy an unlocked one, the cheapest I’ve seen was over 450 pounds. Nowhere seems to stock one either, so I’m not sure how easy they are to get hold of that way. Instead, I signed up for a 12 month contract with Vodafone. For 30 pounds a month, I get the TyTn II and a 5GB data allowance. At the end of the 12 months, I can cancel the contract, I get to keep the TyTn II, and I’ve saved a hundred pounds. Bargain.

Sad News

Last Friday was Rob’s funeral. The service was held in St Mary’s Church in Butetown, and it was standing room only. I thought it was a lovely service, and a great send-off for him. He was buried in Thornhill Cemetery, where we watched as mourners grabbed shovels and buried the coffin there and then. After that, a lot of folks headed down to the Wharf, but I couldn’t face it. I came home and locked myself away for the rest of the day. I just wanted to be alone with my own grief.

I think Corina said it best when she described Rob’s passing as a bad dream that we all wish we could wake up from. After the wife, and being at work, I probably spent more time with Rob than with anyone else the nine years that I knew him.

Teaching News

I had the all-important bit of paper through from Barry College. I’m now formally qualified to teach adults in Lifelong Learning programmes. I passed the teaching assessment with a grade ‘A’ too, which gives me a bit more confidence as I try to turn the Tai Chi class into a more structured two year programme. The whole point of the changes is to build on what Rob figured out about learning Tai Chi, to put it into a format that’s more accessible yet again and also into a plan that’s well paced for the students.

I’m also hard at work with the camcorder, experimenting with the best way to record Tai Chi lessons. This is something I must work harder on

The students enrolling for Intermediate Tai Chi have all successfully completed the Beginners’ class.  They can all do the warm-ups, and they can all play the form from start to end under supervision.  They haven’t begun to incorporate the Ten Principles yet, and they haven’t done any push hands yet.  These are things that I’ve deliberately not included in the Beginners’ Tai Chi, because I believe that it’s simply too much all at once.

My current thinking (which will doubtless change as I refine my plans over the next two months) is centred around my desire to enable my students to take their Tai Chi and enjoy it for the rest of their lives without having to come back for regular classes.  I would love for them to come back (we all get on very well), but I don’t want them to have to.

Proposed learning outcomes for the Intermediate Tai Chi class:

• Students should be able to perform the warm-ups with minimal instruction.
• Students should be able to perform the form with minimal instruction.
• Students should be able to demonstrate an understanding of the Ten Principles.
• Students should be able to perform the static push-hands drills.

What do you think?

I’m wondering how to incorporate both learning the principles and getting enough time at the push hands drills in just 60 hours of contact time.  When you take away time for warm-ups, playing the form at least twice each class, and breaks, at the very best that leaves about 40 minutes each week to introduce students to new material (principles and push hands).  Will that be enough to cover both topics sufficiently?

Today, I don’t know.

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Where are the benchmarks for phar?

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• Tuesday, 8th July 2008; 7pm-9pm
• Tuesday, 22nd July 2008; 7pm-9pm
• Tuesday, 5th August 2008; 7pm-9pm
• Tuesday, 19th August 2008; 7pm-9pm

There will be no classes in September until the next academic year’s classes start. I don’t have confirmed dates for those yet, but when I do, I’ll post them here. I do know that Intermediate Tai Chi will be on Tuesdays, and the Beginners’ Tai Chi will be on Thursday evenings.

Students from my Beginner’s Tai Chi Class 2007-2008 are welcome to these summer classes (whether you completed the year or not).

If you’re interested in joining the next Beginners’ Class (starts September 2008 for 30 weeks), you’re very welcome to come along and see what a class is like, and to have a chat about the course. You’ll not just be able to get my perspective on things; you’ll also be able to chat to existing students to find out how they found the class and my teaching style.

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How Children Start To Learn

When we were small children, starting at pre-school age, we all played a lot.  We used our imaginations to play games like Cops and Robbers, Cowboys and Indians, and many others.  We sure had a lot of fun, and we also learned a lot from it.  Children play games as a way to explore new ideas and roles.  The more they explore, the more sophisticated their ideas in this area become.  Eventually, those who remember their dreams and work hard go on to play these roles for real as adults.  But most of us do not.

As we grow older we get a bit more serious, and playing games (especially in the workplace) no longer seems appropriate to us.  We exchange learning through playing for learning through doing, with a sprinkling of training and education thrown in for good measure.  Most of our doing as adults comes through holding down a job to pay the bills, and it becomes the environment where we find most of our opportunities to learn.

On the job training has become something of a dirty term in the workplace today, because it’s normally a euphemism for being thrown in at the deep end with insufficient / non-existent help and support.  The reason for the lack of support is simply that many employers and managers don’t know how to instruct and coach their staff.  It is something that they have no interest in, and are not comfortable doing.  But they should have such an interest, because the irony is that the workplace is the best place to learn work-related skills - provided we are able to play before we have to be. ((I will talk about the relative merits of training courses in a later article.))

All play starts with behaviours - actions and attitudes that we show to others (externalise).  The game we are playing is how to manage yourself.  If you’re on your own, where can you look for help and advice?

Turn To The Coach

In this field, the work of John C. Wooden stands head and shoulders above everything else.  John C. Wooden was the head coach of the UCLA college basketball team from 1948 to 1975, where he not only consistently created great teams, but where he consistently got the very best out of his charges.  His outstanding work was honoured in 1999 when Coach Wooden was voted ‘Coach of the 20th Century’ by ESPN, and by the award of the President Medal of Freedom (the USA’s highest civilian honour) in 2003.

During his time in basketball, Coach Wooden developed his Pyramid of Success.  It has three key ingredients that make it a great approach for learning how to manage yourself.

• It is principle-based, not practice based - created decades before management books and coaching understood this fundamental approach.  Practices come and go, but the right principles are timeless, and can last for thousands of years.
• It has stood the test of time.  Created over 50 years ago, it was honed through Coach Wooden’s teaching to his college students and teams.   His students took the Pyramid out into the wider world of sports and business, and made it the foundation of their success too.  And since 2003, the management community at large has been able to learn about and apply Coach Wooden’s work through his book Wooden on Leadership.
• It is about you, not about others.  In a time of short-termism, downsizing, offshoring and the threat of recession, it can be no surprise that management writing has come to focus so strongly on the here and now.  All sports coaches are in one of the ultimate results-driven environment; they need immediate results far more than your average manager does, and they have to contend with a turnover of staff (in their case, players) that your average manager never has to face.  But Coach Wooden and his record of coaching at UCLA proved beyond all doubt that, even in such an environment, both short-term results and long-term success comes from within, from internal work that at first seems both unnecessary and without immediate reward.  Success comes from within you the manager, and it must be instilled within each and every member of your team.

The Pyramid of Success

Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success contains 15 separate building blocks for you to work on.  Along the bottom are the five foundation blocks that leadership is build upon.

1. Industriousness: Success travels in the company of very hard work.  There is no trick, no easy way.
2. Friendship: Strive to build a team filled with camaraderie and respect: comrades-in-arms. 
3. Loyalty: Be true to yourself.  Be true to those you lead.
4. Co-operation: Have utmost concern for what’s right rather than who’s right.
5. Enthusiasm: Your energy and enjoyment, drive and dedication will stimulate and greatly inspire others.

If the foundation layer is about your heart, then the next layer is all about using your head.

1. Self-control: Control of your organisation begins with control of yourself.  Be disciplined.
2. Alertness: Constantly be aware and observing.  Always seek to improve yourself and the team.
3. Initiative: Make a decision!  Failure to act is often the biggest failure of all.
4. Intentness: Stay the course.  When thwarted try again; harder, smarter.  Persevere relentlessly.

At the heart of the Pyramid is the formula for teaching success that Coach Wooden learned from Coach Ward Lambert during his playing career.

1. Condition: Ability may get you to the top, but character keeps you there - mental, moral and physical.
2. Skill: What a leader learns after you’ve learned it all is what counts most of all.
3. Team Spirit: The star of the team is the team.  ’We’ supersedes ’me’.

The first twelve blocks together create a platform for success, but to elevate yourself to achieve your full potential, you have to master the cornerstones of true greatness.

1. Poise: Be yourself.  Don’t be thrown off by events whether good or bad.
2. Confidence: The strongest steel is well-founded self-belief.  It is earned, not given.

Finally, we reach the very pinnacle of the Pyramid of Success - the behaviour that the rest of the pyramid supports:

1. Competitive Greatness: Perform at your best when your best is required.  Your best is required each day.

There is far more to Coach Wooden’s Pyramid of Success than I can do justice to in this article, and I would much rather you learned more about it from Coach Wooden himself.  You can download a printable version of the Pyramid, and learn more about each of these building blocks from Coach Wooden’s website.  His 2003 book, Wooden on Leadership, expands on them still further, and is essential reading for anyone looking to follow the Invest In Loss philosophy.

Coach Wooden used it to build a great basketball coach; you can use it to build a great manager - yourself.

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• At the personal level, you’re a role model for everyone around you.  People will look at you and take the message that it is okay for them to act that way too.
• At the inter-personal level, you’re directly influencing how other people feel about working with you.  The way you treat other people directly affects the results you’ll obtain from them.
• At the managerial level, you set the tone for how the whole department will function.  Your choices here will determine how well the department functions - especially when (not if) you’re not around.
• At the organisational level, your individual actions determine whether your department adds value at all, and whether it’s because of you … or despite you.

But how do you go about improving your self-management?

Start Here - Acceptance

You must start by accepting a simple truth: you can learn to consciously choose your responses to whatever happens in your life.  You are not just responsible for your choices - you are able to choose your responses (response-able).

It can be very difficult for new and inexperienced managers to come to see - and especially to accept - just how much influence they really do have, and it always comes down to how much you choose your responses.  Most people do want to be lead, and they do want to be governed, but it must come from someone they can look up to in one way or another.  If you are not cultivating yourself through self-improvement, through learning to choose your responses, then what could there possibly be about you for anyone to look up to?  If they don’t look up to you, at best they follow you reluctantly - if at all.

You are not your past achievements, and if you do not learn to choose your responses, it’s down to luck and circumstance as to whether or not you’ll be able to be successful again in the future.  It won’t be down to you!

The Cycle Of Self Improvement

There is no substitute for hard work.  A person who works hard, and who learns to self-improve, is far more likely to achieve their full potential than someone who always finds things easy.  There is a deeper understanding that comes from hard work and applied brain power than what comes from applied brain power alone.  This is something I’ll come back to in a later article.

With self-improvement, we’re all about stacking the odds in our favour.  We want to reduce both luck and chance as factors in our success, and instead we want to increase ourselves as the factor in our success.  Hard work without direction, organisation and supervision relies entirely on both luck and chance.

The Cycle of Self Improvement contains five key areas where you will find the self-improvement that you are looking for:

Behaviours are where we start.  We start by doing our best to act in the same way that we’d imagine a great manager would act.  We research, and we apply what we’ve learned to what we do and how we do it.  Or, to put it another way, we fake it until we make it.  This is difficult at first, because we’re trying to be something that we don’t necessarily understand …

Paradigms is where we start to gain an understanding.  By changing our behaviours, and learning what works and what doesn’t, we start to change the way we think about ourselves and our work.  If we make a conscious effort to study whatever we are trying to improve at, we will create new models in our heads of how this particular area works.

Maturity is where our actions (our behaviours) and our thinking (our paradigms) are refined in the crucible of experience.  As we mature in our role, there’s less faking it, less mistakes, and more genuine ability.  Our understanding matures, and we move beyond mere knowledge to the point where we ‘get it’.

Character is where our maturity of understanding feeds back and we internalise what until now have been entirely outward changes.  We start conquering our demons (and those of our parents that we’ve inherited), and move towards a freedom of operation, of living, that most people never achieve.  We become more rounded as people as we smooth off corners and jagged edges.

Eventually, we go beyond ourselves and learn to Invest in Loss.  It isn’t about us any more; it’s about what is and what needs to be.  We learn to accept reality and work with things instead of against them.  We move from trying to be masters of the universe to being its servant, which is where life suddenly gets a whole lot easier :)

Finally, we start again with behaviours; we apply our new understanding all over again, continuing round the cycle once more.  No matter how good any of us get, we’re all capable of further improvement, of further polishing.  There are always deeper levels of understanding available to us, but only if we put the hard work in first and master the outer levels.

These are the five steps of the cycle of self improvement, and we’ll look at each one in turn over the next five articles here on the Invest In Loss blog.

We Have An Infinite Capacity To Improve

There is always more room for improvement, which is why the cycle goes back to the beginning and starts again.  Our aim is to smooth things out, to bring every aspect of ourselves up to the same level, and then to raise that level over and over again.  It was this strategy - to find and improve 100 things by 1% - which is widely attributed to bringing World Cup success to the England Rugby Union team in 2003.

A word of caution though: entropy (and specifically the principle of use it or lose it) applies just as much to self-improvement as to any other aspect of life.  If you stop trying to improve, you will inevitably regress over time.  This isn’t work you can do during study days, or through a few days on a management training course.  There are no secrets, and there are no quick wins.  You have to integrate this work into your life, and into every single day that you can.

If you can achieve that, you’ve done the hardest work of all.

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• 24 step Tai Chi with Master Wang Ming Bo and his students
• Tai Chi and nei gong with Master Zhu Jian Li
• Two persons push hands drill with Master Shen Xing You and Master Shen Xing Zuo
• Chen style Tai Chi with Master Gu Yong Fa
• Wu style Tai Chi with Master Zhang Xi Xing
• Yang style Tai Chi with David Thorpe, Colin Jefferson and Jon Kilgarriff

Well worth a look, to get an idea of how different Tai Chi styles look, especially for my students, as our style has quite a few differences that you should be able to spot :)

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And it arrived today  Full review to follow after sunny skies (well, okay, I’ll settle for it to stop raining) and some field testing …

The Nutcracker is a fantastic piece of art, and something everyone who creates software should take the time to go and study!  The whole point of the Nutcracker is to open peoples’ eyes to just how unnecessarily and ridiculously overly-complicated we make things.  You can find this contraption in The Core building, where it stands as the main draw in the room.  Just don’t forget to take the time to check out everything else in the room too :) 

This photo of the Rainforest Biodome has been chosen as the front cover photo for this year’s guide book.  They’ve cropped the top down a bit, and made it look really fantastic.  They were also kind enough to credit me at the back of the guide book.  It’s a great testament to the quality that the Nikon D200 and Nikkor 18-135mm lens combo can produce.   

I’m chuffed to bits over this  

We’ll be heading back down to the Eden Project in the near future, where I’m looking forward to taking photos of some of the things we missed first time around.  I might end up posting a shot of me standing beside the guide books too …

Most Recommendations

There were six Firefox extensions that folks repeatedly recommended …

1. ColorZilla - advanced eyedropper, color picker, page zoomer and other colorful goodies.
2. FireBug - live DOM & CSS inspector.  The single greatest web developer add-on for Firefox.
3. Live HTTP Headers - view HTTP headers of a page and whilst browsing.
4. Web Developer Toolbar - adds a menu and a toolbar with various web developer tools.
5. YSlow - Yahoo’s tool for analysing web pages and telling you why they are slow.  Requires Firebug.
6. Zend Studio Toolbar - debugging assistance for Zend Studio 5.5 and earlier.  Isn’t mentioned on the Zend Studio 6 pages, so does that mean it is now obsolete?

… and after that, there was a lot of variety amongst the other extensions that were recommended.

Also Recommended

1. Cache Status - easy cache status & management from the status bar.
2. ChatZilla - IRC client for Firefox.
3. Duplicate Tab - clone a tab along with its history.
4. Edit Cookies - edit your cookies right in Firefox.
5. Fasterfox - performance and network tweaks for Firefox.
6. Firefox Accessibility Extension - test your web pages for functional accessibility features based on the iCITA HTML Best Practices.
7. FirePHP - print to your Firebug console using a simple PHP function call.
8. FireShot - take screenshots of web pages, and a whole lot more.
9. Google Toolbar - Google’s famous in-browser search toolbar.
10. GreaseMonkey - customise the way a web page displays using your own Javascript add-ons.  See also Lifehacker’s Top 10 Greasemonkey User Scripts, and their Better GMail and Better Flickr add-ons to get an idea of just what can be done with Greasemonkey as a Firefox extension tool.
11. HTML Validator - add HTML validation to your browser.
12. IE Tab (Windows only) - open Firefox tabs using IE’s rendering engine.  See also the popular IE View alternative.
13. LocationBar2 - adds additional features to Firefox’s address bar.
14. Lorem Ipsum content generator - Generate “Lorem Ipsum” dummy text, for when you need to fill a page with content for testing purposes.  
15. MeasureIt - draw out a ruler to get the pixel width and height of any element on the web page.
16. NagiosChecker - see the status of your services and servers in Firefox’s status bar.  You do monitor your servers, right?
17. PrefBar - power user toolbar for Firefox.  
18. Regular Expressions Tester - testing tool for regular expressions with colour highlighting.
19. RefSpoof - easy spoofing of the HTTP referrer header.
20. ReloadEvery - reloads a web page every so many seconds.
21. Save Session - save your current browser windows & tabs for the next time you open Firefox.
22. Scrapbook - save web pages locally and easily manage collections.  (Like OS X web archives, as supported by Together, DevonThink, and so on, but cross-platform).
23. Selenium IDE - record, edit and debug tests for Selenium, the automated UI testing tool for web developers.  See also PHPUnit’s support for Selenium.  You do have reproducible testing for you web apps, right?
24. Stylish - fix ugly sites, customise the look of your browser or mail client by using your own CSS files.  Stylish is to CSS what Greasemonkey is to Javascript.
25. Tab Mix Plus - tab management on steroids.
26. Tamper Data - view and modify HTTP/HTTPS headers and POST parameters.
27. TimestampDecode - treats the selected number as a timestamp and displays a decoded date/time.
28. TitlebarTweaks - tweak Firefox’s titlebar text.
29. User Agent Switcher - Adds a menu and a toolbar button to switch the user agent of the browser.
30. Venkman - Javascript debugger for Firefox.

Stu’s Recommends

To round off the list, here are a few extensions that I find useful, but which weren’t recommended.  If you haven’t heard of these before, give them a try.

1. Flagfox - display a country flag in the status bar for the location of the current website’s server.
2. Server Switcher - easily switch between development and production servers.
3. Show MyIP - display your current external IP address. 
4. SQLite Manager - Manage any SQLIte database on your computer.

Are you a web developer?  Got a favourite Firefox extension that isn’t on this list?  Let us know in the comments below.

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Cross Hands - A Popular Move

Here’s a short video I’ve uploaded to YouTube demonstrating the different places where we cross hands in our form:

1. Cross Hands after Shoulder Press
2. Cross Hands after Box Ears (which is repeated again at the end of our form)
3. Cross Hands Low after Golden Pheasant Stands on One Leg, immediately followed by Cross Hands after Golden Pheasant Stands On One Leg (repeated twice, but not properly shown on the video)
4. Crossed Guard in Fair Ladies corner #1
5. Crossed Guard in Fair Ladies corner #2
6. Crossed Hands in Fair Ladies corner #4
7. Cross Hands Travelling Low after the Second Squatting Single Whip, immediately followed by Step Up To Seven Stars

In most of these moves, we’re in motion as we play Cross Hands.  Normally we’re moving off to the side, which is consistent with the idea of using Cross Hands to bridge with an opponent before taking control of their energy and using it against them.  But there are a couple of cases where this clearly isn’t happening in our version of the form, and I find that interesting.

Cross Hands As A Block

What’s going on with the Cross Hands Low immediately after Golden Pheasant Stands On One Leg, the third example in the video?  Take another look at it.  With my current understanding of Tai Chi, that looks like a two-handed block against a kick, in a very static position, followed by a block against a follow-up strike or punch.

This is where I had a better understanding of the fighting side of our art, for sure.  The immediate question I have about this is one of practicality.  Would the Cross Hands Low be strong enough to block a kick, and what is the likelihood of the kick causing serious damage to the hands and wrists in the process?

It stands out for me as something to investigate further because it seems quite the anomaly …

The Crossed Guard In Fair Ladies

In the first two corners of Fair Ladies Weaves Shuttles To The Four Corners, we almost cross hands but not quite.  The left hand falls and the right hand rises, but they pass left hand inside right, as if guarding the right side of the head and body as one zone from attack.  Lacking a better name for this move, I’ve started calling it Crossed Guard.

It shares one of the major characteristics of Cross Hands - the arm attached to the leading shoulder is on the outside of the move.  Indeed, in corner #4, we actually play Cross Hands, which immediately separates out into a head guard and a body guard.

So my first question to investigate is whether or not we should Cross Hands in corners #1 and #2 before immediately transitioning into Crossed Guard (artistically, possibly, but from a martial perspective, I have doubts).  And my second question?  Where should the emphasis and explanation be for folks who are in it for the health benefits rather than the martial aspect?

Summing Up

Hopefully my video doesn’t suck too badly (I’m pretty sure my performance does!) and it gives you an idea of the different ways we play Cross Hands in the Ng Family Yang Style Tai Chi form that I study and teach.

The video shows two areas - Cross Hands Low and Fair Ladies corners #1 and #2 - where we play Cross Hands differently, and where I currently have questions about both form and function.  

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The most common advice given to new photographers is this: always have your camera with you.  You never know when you’ll come across something worth taking a picture of. That was certainly the case in March 2007, when Kristi and I enjoyed this beautiful scene on the way to work.

This is Cardiff City Hall, opened in 1904.  The tag-line for Cardiff is that it is Europe’s Youngest Capital City, but I wonder how many people realise just how modern its magnificent civic centre is?

Like most drivers, I hate speed cameras.  Too many of them, especially over in England, seem to be sited in places where they are most likely to generate revenue.  This camera in Cathays, Cardiff, is one of the more sensibly located cameras.  It’s placed outside a private nursery / school, on a road that has a major cycleway down the opposite side.

The car park on the opposite side has been built where the Glamorganshire Canal once ran, and the lane disappearing off into the distance is approximately the route that the canal used to follow up towards Gabalfa.

Presumably because the companies will have gone bust from a lack of good leadership.  Something we’ve seen before, and will see again.

The successful IT departments in the sort of larger organisations that can provide food and shelter for your true “classic geek” have been part of the business for the last decade, if not longer.  Before we had the sexy CTO and CIO titles, there were IT Managers and Operations Managers who did all this stuff with little fan-fare and trumpet blowing.  They did it on a budget, so they had to have financial management skills.  They managed staff, so they had to have people skills.  They delivered results, so they had to have project management skills.  They made sure the business could do its job, so they had to have quality assurance skills.  They implemented approaches such as ITIL and more lately CoBIT to ensure that the IT department was aligned to the business and relevant regulation.  And they did this whilst still groking computers.  In fact, they did this because they groked computers.

I’ve seen this sort of nonsense before when Java came on the scene, and the rise of the Web 2.0 blogger means I’m seeing it again.  ”Everything is new, everything is different; the old skills and the old lessons no longer apply, so don’t bother learning them” - that is the seductive siren call.  Any student of management history can trace this echo back hundreds if not thousands of years.  The core skills of good governance - direction, organisation and supervision - have not changed.  You can read the works of Confucius from over two thousand years ago, and the principles behind the lessons for the leaders of the time are no different than the principles behind the lessons for the leaders of today.  Practices have changed, but not principles.

There are no secrets, no short-cuts for those-in-the-know; not in business, engineering, or the arts.  You have to know the basics, and you have to do the basics.  Hard work and dedication is always the key, and you won’t find a single leading member of the PHP development team who doesn’t reflect that reality.

So what does this have to do with our favourite punch-bag here on Planet PHP, Ruby on Rails?  For me, the rallying call of Rails is different from the Java and Web 2.0 hype/bullshit machines.  I cringe every time Terry takes a swipe at it.  Whilst I’m as sick of the term ‘agile’ as can be, Rails doesn’t try to claim that the old skills don’t matter.  Quite the opposite.  What they have done is to take the old skills and put them into one approach that can, and does, really work exceptionally well for a lot of firms and a lot of problems.  They’ve worked out what the basics are, and they’ve designed a whole paradigm that ensures the basics are done well.  They’ve executed in a way that the PHP community should be in awe of, not taking the piss out of.

They are years ahead of us in so many important areas, and yet PHP is thriving more than ever.  They must have done something wrong, because they sure didn’t grow the market for web applications.  What did they do wrong?

The fundamental mistake the Rails designers have made, and one that they still haven’t groked en-mass that I can see, is architectural, not philosophical.  Rails is a classic application server, with all the deterministic, concurrency and big-iron-needed-here problems that stopped J2EE from squeezing out PHP at the turn of the century.  For many of the problems of the web, the PHP execute-again architecture has repeatedly been proven to be superior to the application server architecture.  

• PHP is easier for average-skilled folks to deploy.  What’s the point of creating applications if you can’t figure out how to run them anywhere but your bedroom?
• It is easier to track down and eliminate bugs in PHP applications.  No persistent processes mean that PHP applications are deterministic.  PHP code is also much simpler to work through and debug.
• It is easier to scale applications written in PHP.  Folks have done it, and other folks have repeated it.  The Rails community as yet has not.  
• It may be quicker to create applications in Rails, but the operational costs once the application goes into production quickly erode that advantage.  If you’re not in the US, servers cost real money, and application servers need more iron than the equivalent PHP code.

The Agile community likes to talk about “smells”, so how come they don’t see something like mod_rails and gag on the stench of trying to mask architectural failings with such cleverness?

Before I make it onto Terry’s Christmas card list, I should state that I firmly believe that Ruby itself is a programming language that is vastly superior to PHP, especially when you get away from Apache and are creating the behind-the-scenes plumbing required.  The OO in Rails continues to leave PHP for dead, and OO brings many advantages to a thriving development community.  There are real advantages to being able to share code between both the must-be-real-time web front-end and the non-real time backends, and to be able to easily reuse whatever external open-source libraries save you time and effort.  And I believe that solutions such as the Ruby gems are vastly superior to PEAR and PECL.  PEAR/PECL should have been our CPAN, or our RubyForge.  They deliberately chose not to be, wrongly believing that CPAN was a negative feature of Perl.  They believed that one high-quality solution would prove the superior model over time.  They failed to execute, and the paradigm was plain wrong in the first place.

My prediction is that a Rails-like framework, but built using a PHP-style mod_ruby and execute-again architecture, would have a real chance at displacing PHP.  RoR the application server hasn’t a snowball’s chance in hell of achieving that.  Their market firmly remains the same market that .NET and Java already fight over, and it’s a market they’re very welcome to.

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Last summer, I hiked up the Little Garth to take some shots of the remains of Walnut Junction Viaduct.  It’s normally a very easy walk (provided the ground is dry!), but this time the rains had brought more than just mud down onto the path … just don’t tell the missus that I scrambled over this thing both on the way up and on the way down

With the car in the garage for its M.OT., the quickest way on foot for me get to and from the garage is down Merthyr Road, through Treforest, and then up the A473 to Power Station Hill. It’s a fair walk, but it’s worth it for those times of the year when the leaves are green and this stretch of the A473 is empty.

And, for my students, a treasure hunt … can you spot which of the Thirteen Postures appears where in Grasp Sparrows Tail? Especially the one I haven’t mentioned yet in my class? :)

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We’ve a lot of work ahead to get these students to the point where they are confident playing the form by themselves, without prompting from me.  If they come back for next year, I’ll also be able to introduce them to the Ten Principles that guide and shape our particular tiny little school of Tai Chi.

But this is a major milestone, and I can’t congratulate my students enough for their hard work and dedication.

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A Bit About Packt

Mastering phpMyAdmin 2.11 for Effective MySQL Management by Marc Delisle is the third edition of this book, and it follows the usual pattern of Packt Publishing books.  The book has clearly defined objectives on the cover, and it follows a clear progression of its chosen subject from start to end.  It is well presented, with a clear layout and clean page design that makes it easy to read.  The book also includes a sizeable index, something no decent technical book can be without.

I’m really pleased to see that Packt are now providing example code online for download, as well as online errata for the book.  Many of their earlier books reviewed here on Planet PHP have been criticised for not doing so; it’s great to see Packt improving in this area.

No matter which Packt book you pick up, don’t let the use of language be the reason you put it back on the shelf.  Most Packt books are written and reviewed by folks who don’t speak English as their first language.  Once you get used to it, it’s never really a problem, but it’s worth pointing it out because if you browse their books at your local bookstore, it might put you off at first.   

Introducing phpMyAdmin

If you’ve never heard of it, phpMyAdmin is (imho) one of the most important open source projects for the LAMP stack.  phpMyAdmin provides a web-based admin interface for MySQL, making it extremely easy for folks new to the LAMP stack to start working with databases, and a very convenient way to avoid firing up the MySQL command-line if you need to check something or make changes to your databases.

It feels like phpMyAdmin has been around forever.

Unfortunately, it looks that way too at times.  In the post Google Maps world of AJAX enabled slick and efficient user interfaces, phpMyAdmin’s usefulness can be hampered by its Web 1.0 UI, and by its continued reliance of manual configuration instead of a Wordpress-like admin panel.  Don’t get me wrong, phpMyAdmin is a good tool without equal atm, but it’s a workmanlike and functional tool that younger folks used to the Facebook world find a bit long in the tooth.

About The Book

Marc’s book is aimed both at folks new to MySQL and phpMyAdmin as well as experienced developers such as myself who aren’t aware of the advanced features that have been added over the years.  The full chapter list is:

1. Introducing phpMyAdmin
2. Installing  phpMyAdmin
3. Interface Overview
4. First Steps
5. Changing Data
6. Changing Table Structures
7. Exporting Structure and Data
8. Importing Structure and Data
9. Searching Data
10. Table and Database Operations
11. The Relational System
12. Entering SQL Commands
13. The Multi-Table Query Generator
14. Bookmarks
15. System Documentation
16. MIME-Based Transformations
17. Character Sets and Collations
18. MySQL 5.0 Features
19. MySQL Server Administration
20. Troubleshooting and Support

The first ten chapters cover the basics of using phpMyAdmin.  If you’re new to phpMyAdmin, these chapters will be very helpful to you, and if you’ve been using phpMyAdmin for years, there’s still little bits in here that you might not have been aware of before now.  I particularly like the way that these chapters often refer back to the configuration settings in phpMyAdmin’s config file.  However, towards the end of this section, the material starts to feel a bit rushed, as if the author himself can’t wait to get onto the clever features of phpMyAdmin that have yet to come.  If you’re completely new to MySQL, you might find the end of this section to be a little light on detail.  I hope the next edition of this book beefs these chapters up a bit.

Like most people I know, my use of phpMyAdmin over the years has tended to stick with the basics: creating and browsing tables.  I confess, it’s partly because I’ve found the phpMyAdmin UI to be more and more clunky as time has gone by, a throwback to the days before Google showed us just what could be done with Javascript and AJAX.  So the second half of the book, which looks at the more advanced features of phpMyAdmin, were ones I found very educational.  I had no idea, for example, that phpMyAdmin now includes an AJAX-based Designer tool, or that I can use phpMyAdmin to generate PDF documentation of my databases.  I found these chapters to be very detailed and informative, although again towards the end of the second half of the book, the chapters began to feel a little rushed in places to me.

Conclusion

I have several new starters joining my team in June, and it’ll be interesting to see whether or not they find the book useful as they find their feet in their first job doing PHP web development.  One thing’s for sure: I’ll have no hesitation in leaving this book out for them to read.

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The time has flown by - I must be having a lot of fun :) 

It’s a shame that this First Great Western train I’m on atm (the 19:15 from Paddington to Swansea) isn’t going as quick.  For once, it’s not the fault of First Great Western or their (in my experience, all too often unprofessional) staff, but after two hours we’re just pulling into Didcot Parkway, and not Cardiff where we should be.  Hopefully we’re past the latest problem to plague this service, and it’ll be a much quicker second half of the journey!

This job is full of pleasures both big and small.  One of the small ones today was to introduce one of my colleagues to the joy that is the Foyles bookshop in London.  If you’ve never been to Foyles, it’s difficult to explain why this wonderful shop is different to all the other bookshops in central London (and, I believe, in the UK as a whole), but every time I get to show someone this mecca of books, the reaction is always a good one.

I managed to escape with just three books: one of the Wu style of Tai Chi, a replacement for my loaned-and-never-to-be-returned copy of the Principles of Effortless Power (another martial arts book), and the new book from Packt on OpenSER.  That last one is going to live in the office, me thinks.

I also managed to escape the Apple store without a new Macbook Pro, but only because they didn’t have a 4GB RAM model to hand for me to take with me there and then (they normally do the upgrade in the shop on demand, but I didn’t have the time to wait the three hours they quoted for it).  As much as I love my current Macbook Pro, I’m finding the short battery life (<2 hours on average) to be a bit tight on the longer journeys I’m now doing.  The later generations can manage double that, which I’d find much more convenient.  Ah well, maybe later in the year as a Christmas treat to myself. 

The worst thing I’ve done so far was totally self-inflicted.  I managed to brick my Nokia N82.  As wonderful as Parallels is for running Windows on the Mac, never ever try running a Nokia firmware upgrade using it.  I tried; the whole virtual machine died partway through the firmware upgrade, and the N82 was toast.  (Wouldn’t it be great if Nokia had A/B firmware slots like digital cameras do?  They could release firmware upgrades much more regularly and not be worried about silly folks like me bricking their phones).  It had to be sent back to Nokia, and I’m missing it greatly.  I hope it comes back soon!  Then I can start loading Ordnance Survey raster data onto it

Oh, we’ve just made it to Swindon.  Maybe I’ll make it home today instead of tomorrow after all …

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The roots of success always come from within. Your team, your organisation, the results it produces and the service you provide to your customers; ultimately all of these will be a reflection of you and the way that you conduct yourself. You can only control and influence others through your own actions; if you don’t have control over yourself, how can you possible extend that control to others successfully and sustainably?

The very first step in managing using the Invest In Loss philosophy is to learn to manage yourself.

Know Thyself

Someone once told me that you can’t manage what you can’t understand, and I believe that this advice applies equally well when it comes to managing yourself. How can you manage yourself if you don’t understand yourself?

How well do you really know yourself?

The place to start is to simply become aware of your behaviour, and how close it does (or does not) relate to the reality all around you. How many lies and half-truths do you have to tell to get through each day? How often do you have to bluff and bluster your way through situations and relationships with your colleagues, your friends, and your families? When do you stand and get stuck in, and when do you run and avoid? When do you say one thing, but do another? Why are you having to do so? What are the reasons behind you behaving in this way?

At first, simply focus on becoming aware of when you act like this, and on determining why. Don’t do anything in particular at this stage to change your behaviour, just focus on improving your self-awareness day by day. If you don’t already, start keeping a daily diary where you can capture your observations and thoughts. Look in particular at the boundaries of your world - your interactions with other people, both professional and personal. Seek out where friction occurs, where things are not smooth and plain sailing, and where emotions (especially yours) regularly boil over. Focus entirely on what you are doing.

You Reap What You Sow

When you’ve been building up your observations for some time (I’d recommend at least a month, and preferably several months), the next step is to see how far you are (or aren’t) disjointed from the reality around you.

Continue to capture the observations of your own behaviour, but now start to add in observations about your external world. How well is that latest project going? What are your customers grumbling about this week? If you are already a manager, what are your staff saying about you? What are they saying about your decisions? How are the family? What should be happening, but isn’t?

Over time, you will start to gain a new awareness: how your lies and half-truths, how your blustering and bluffing, and how your avoidance and your fear are related to the problems you encounter in the external world. Your world - your reality - is a reflection of your behaviour, and more importantly of the way that you choose to behave. You must stick with this exercise for as long as it takes for the penny to drop. As a manager, your team or organisation will also be a reflection of the way that you choose to behave.

You cannot sustainably manage others until you can manage yourself.

Deep Roots Are Hidden From View

Deep and meaningful change comes from internal work. It is not for the faint of heart. It requires a commitment and dedication that you probably haven’t known before. You must give up being both selfish and selfless, and become self-ful instead. You must become completely focused on observing and altering your own state of being. You don’t need to worry about changing other people at this time. If you make the right changes, other people will respond to you in the right way if they can.

This is work that never ends, which is precisely why it produces truly sustainable results.

Working from the principle of cause and effect, start to look at whatever comes before the situations where your behaviour is disconnected from reality. In any situation, you behave the way you do because of the state you are in when you enter the situation. Focus on understanding what your entry state currently is for your each of your situations, and add those observations to your ongoing diary. Seek to understand your starting point each and every time, and on how these starting points result in the behaviours that we’re seeking to change.

For each of these starting points, take a piece of blank paper, and write down what you wish they were. It might be helpful to create a mind map for each starting point. Work out what you need to ensure that you wouldn’t need to lie, to bluff, to avoid; what you need to be confident, on top of things, and to able to act. Don’t feel constrained in any way by your current circumstances. Don’t compromise on your list.

Once you’ve worked out what each starting point should be, go back further, and look at what you are currently doing immediately before you get to each of these places. This is where you need to make changes. Your starting points are actually the end points of previous activities, or of activities that are currently missing altogether! Fix these activities, and everything else will follow.

This is what we mean when we talk about beginning with the end in mind.

The Never-Ending Circle

The work presented here never ends. The end of one thing is always the beginning of the next, even if the connections aren’t immediately apparent. Thankfully, we’re all capable of an infinite amount of polishing up, of improvement over time - as long as we take responsibility for our own progress. By choosing your behaviour, and establishing your entry state by ensuring the previous activities end the way you need them to, over time you’ll grow the degree of management you have over yourself … and ultimately over others.

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This has created a gap that a number of third-party solutions have attempted to fill. One solution you may have heard of is mpm-itk, by Steinar H. Gunderson. How well does it work, and how well does it perform?

• mpm-itk: Running Apache As A Specified User
• Installing mpm-itk
• Configuring Apache
• Some Benchmarks
• Other Considerations
• Conclusions

mpm-itk: Running Apache As A Specified User

Like mpm-peruser, mpm-itk is an alternative multi-processing module (MPM) for Apache 2.x.  It also allows each website’s PHP scripts to run as a separate user.  But the main difference is that it doesn’t maintain separate pools of processes for each user.  Instead, after the PHP request has completed, each process is terminated, and new processes must be created to handle new requests.

Until I researched mpm-itk for this article, I didn’t realise that it didn’t recycle processes after each request.  This means that there’s no chance at all of it matching mpm-peruser for performance (something I suggested was possible), but that doesn’t mean that mpm-itk is entirely without merit.

Installing mpm-itk

mpm-itk needs to be compiled into your Apache installation.  It cannot be loaded as a module.

First of all, download the Apache source code, and then download either the mpm-itk patch for Apache 2.0, or the mpm-itk patch for Apache 2.2.  For this article, I’m going to focus on Apache 2.2, but the same instructions should apply for Apache 2.0.

Unpack the Apache source code, apply the mpm-itk patch, and rebuild Apache’s build scripts:

$ mkdir -p /tmp/apache-itk
$ cd /tmp/apache-itk
$ wget http://www.mirrorservice.org/sites/ftp.apache.org/httpd/httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz
$ wget http://mpm-itk.sesse.net/apache2.2-mpm-itk-20080105-00.patch
$ tar -zxf httpd-2.2.8.tar.gz
$ cd httpd-2.2.8
$ patch -p1 < ../apache2.2-mpm-itk-20080105-00.patch
$ autoconf

Then, configure the Apache source code to build with mpm-itk as the chosen MPM.  Make sure that you run configure with any other configuration switches that you need:

$ ./configure --with-mpm=itk

After that, compile and install Apache:

$ make ; make install

Configuring Apache

mpm-itk is very easy to configure.  For each of your virtual hosts, simply add the AssignUserId entry:

<VirtualHost *:80>
ServerName www.example.com
...

<IfModule mpm_itk_module>
AssignUserId stuart stuart
</IfModule>
</VirtualHost>

AssignUserId takes two parameters:

• The first parameter is the user ID to run Apache under for this website.
• The second parameter is the group ID to run Apache under for this website.

Remember to restart Apache after adding AssignUserId, and you should be all set.

Some Benchmarks

To benchmark mpm-itk, I used Apache’s ab benchmark to load a simple phpinfo() page 1,000 times. I ran the benchmark five times, and averaged the results.

• mpm-itk: average of 37.01 seconds
• mpm-prefork: average of 6.21 seconds

mpm-itk benchmarks much better than suexec and suphp, but is still quite a bit slower than mpm-peruser.

Other Considerations

It isn’t just about performance.  Both suexec and suphp bring limitations to your PHP applications, but mpm-itk does not.  Because mpm_itk puts the job of switching users in the right place - at the heart of Apache - it allows your code to run under mod_php.  As a result, your code is free to take advantage of any Apache features that aren’t available to PHP/CGI, such as HTTP authentication support.

Another consideration is the impact on RAM and CPU.  Whilst you can definitely use mpm-peruser to provide a faster solution, it does involve a lot of effort in tuning the size of the process pools for each of the websites on a shared server.  On a shared hosting server, you can’t necessarily find one tuned configuration that always suits demand - and it may not be worth your time to put the effort in anyway.  Although mpm-itk is slower, it doesn’t need tuning for each individual website.  It’s more of a fire-and-forget solution that might appeal to hosting providers who don’t know (and don’t really need to care) what your customers websites are.

Conclusions

Although it needs to be compiled from source, mpm-itk provides the security of suexec and suphp with much greater performance than either of these solutions.  Although it performs worse than mpm-peruser, mpm-itk doesn’t require as much effort to configure and tune for best performance, and its greater simplicity probably makes it better suited to shared hosting servers running a random collection of websites.

mpm-itk is an option that you should seriously consider when designing your shared hosting server solution.

This article is part of The Web Platform, an on-going series of blog posts about the environment that you need to create and nurture to run your web-based application in. If you have any topics that you’d like to see covered in future articles, please leave them in the comments on this page.

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The first week in the new job has been great.  I’ve got this big silly grin on my face (even though I’m thoroughly knackered from all the commuting).  There’s a lot of hard work ahead, but it’s exactly the sort of work that I find fun.  I guess there’s something wrong with me

The travelling hasn’t been too bad.  Monday was the worst, when the 18:35 from Bath Spa didn’t turn up at all.  I finally got home just after 21:00, thoroughly shattered.  Lesson learned; I need to be out the door in time for the 16:35 where possible, or for the 17:35 at the latest.  Any later than that, and a hotel for the night is worth serious consideration.

Working on the train out from Cardiff on a morning is a real luxury.  Most managers never get - or take - the time on a morning to review the day ahead.  At the moment, the time’s mostly going on all the new stuff I have to learn, but it’s going to be a real godsend as I’m more involved in the day to day.  Amusingly (to me, anyway) this is the same train I was catching down to Southampton during my secondment to the OS (albeit an hour earlier), so it already feels like I’ve been doing this routine for months.

On the train back, it’s a bit more hit and miss.  Most days, I’ve been able to snag a table seat, or one of those seats at the end opposite the space for the wheelchairs (those spaces are the best; the table seats on these First Great Western commuter trains are quite cramped), but when FGW forget to stick the right number of carriages on the train, it’s standing-room only all the way back to Cardiff.  Thankfully, there are plenty of excellent audiobooks one can buy and listen to when this happens.  Management audiobooks are very popular, but I’m seriously thinking of getting all of the Harry Potter audiobooks for when distraction is the better approach.

I have to give a special mention, and a huge thank you, to everyone for making me feel so welcome.  Most places make an effort for new staff, but this is different, because I don’t think they’re making a special effort.  It feels a lot like my time working at the University of Sheffield - and those were without doubt the happiest years of my professional life so far.

I definitely owe Aled a beer for putting me onto this job in the first place.

I ran into Richard from Box UK on the platform at Cardiff a couple of times this week.  It’s nice to hear that I’m being missed, and I certainly miss the sort of work I wanted to do there, but right now I don’t miss the work I ended up doing there.  Everyone tells me that I’m great at consultancy, but it doesn’t give me the personal satisfaction that working on products, services and systems does.  I guess it’s why I took to Tai Chi; I’m a natural observer, and I love that iterative polishing and improving something release after release after release.  You just don’t get that in consultancy.  Consultancy all to often is like a one-night stand.  As some of you who are married will understand from your own experience, there’s a much more meaningful fulfilment to be had from a deeper commitment.

I bumped up the RAM on the MacBook Pro this evening.  It’s now at the max of 3GB; shame it won’t go to 4GB like the later generation MBPs will.  It’s mostly to speed up Aperture 2, and to make things a bit quicker when I’m running a couple of virtual machines at a time (CentOS and Ubuntu for work).

Tomorrow is toy day.  Got to send the dead Cisco router back for a replacement, and the new phone and GPS navigator should arrive too.  I’ve bought the Garmin Mobile XT product and an unlocked Nokia N82 to run it on.  The N82 is mainly to play with VoIP over Wifi, although it does have a 5 megapixel camera too, which I’m looking forward to.  Bath is a very pretty place after all, and I’m learning the virtue of travelling as light as possible.

Hopefully Sunday I’ll make it out to get some more Merthyr Road photography done.  There’s some old railway tracks in the woods at Treforrest that I wouldn’t mind taking a careful look at.

I haven’t, until today.  That’s over eight years of experience with no reliable record - only the neurones of my brain as an unreliable witness.  How much have I learned and forgotten, and how many questions have I come across that I no longer recall?

In my experience, practising Tai Chi is a series of personal revelations.  No progress is made, sometimes for months, and then WHAM - the pieces fall into place and my understanding takes a tiny step forward.  The progress comes not through answers, but by finding the questions.  When you find the right questions, the answers don’t provide the information - they simply show you what you’ve already come to understand.

For example, take one of the most basic hand movements in Tai Chi - cross hands.  For the first eight years of my training, all the questions (from myself, and from fellow students) were about “what is it for?” or “how does it work?”  They’re important questions; the student needs to know that cross hands is used to block kicks and punches, and they need to know how the timing and distancing works.  If the student is more interested in health than martial, then the answers need to be couched in those terms instead.

But I no longer think that they’re the right questions, not with the outlook on the question as progress.  The right question is “why is it that so-and-so arm is on the outside?”  The answer to that ensures that form and function falls into place as a result.

In our form (Ng Family Yang Style Tai Chi Chuan), it is always the arm attached to the leading shoulder that sits on the outside of cross hands.  We move left, and it is the left arm on the outside.  We move right, and it is the right arm on the outside.  Every time.  Without fail.  We’re always looking to move into a block, and we’re always looking to snag an arm or a leg and take it with us.

We’re always in continuous motion (one of the ten important principles from Yang Chen’fu), and cross hands appears deliberately designed to ensure that the move maximises the benefits of being in motion.

It also gives me new questions (well, new to me anyway!) about the old saying of the needle in the cotton, which I’ll look at next time.

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Most of Thursday went on a nice walk around Pontypridd, taking photos for my next Merthyr Road article, which I’m calling Bridging The Rivers At Pontypridd.  I also wrote up blog articles for two older photosets from my travels … Winter In Eden, and Back in Brighton.  That brought me almost up to date (but not quite) with my backlog of work.  Spent the evening processing the bridge photos, and went to bed unhappy with the results.

Friday was a lazy day, after tidying up the house that is!  Two more photography blog articles to clear the backlog: The Towers Of Brains Brewery, and Easter In The Malvern Hills.  Took another look at the bridge photos.  Decided to keep the HDR versions after all, but to tone down the colours to make them look much closer to LDR (ie normal) images.  Figured out how to fool Aperture into backing up photos to a network drive - I need to write that up in a blog posting.  Also had fun playing around with the “create a book” tools in Aperture.  I like the idea of taking my Merthyr Road articles, and making them into books that can be ordered online, but I think Aperture’s book features are a bit too limited for that.  More thought required here, me thinks.

Work up this morning with terrible cramp in my left calf.  Haven’t had a cramp attack like that for months!  Taught Kristi some basic Chinese massage so that she could fix up my leg.  Hobbled down to the station, and bought my monthly season ticket to Bath for Monday.  The look on the lady’s face was priceless, and I promised her that when I can finally afford an annual ticket (costing over £3k), I’ll come back and buy it through her, and not down in Cardiff.  Watched Never Back Down at Cineworld in Cardiff with Kristi … it’s shallow and predictable, but with plenty of eye candy on offer for both sexes.  Watch out for the guy who plays Ryan; I think we’ll see a lot more from him in the future.  Enjoyed the first episode of the new Doctor Who series this evening, although I still think that RTD over-uses background music. Here’s hoping he takes a back seat from here; the best episodes of the last season were those he didn’t write.

Kristi made me watch the original Buffy the Vampire Slayer movie this evening (boo for Sky+ boxes).  I’m utterly amazed that they managed to get a TV show off the ground on the back of this outing.  I managed to escape after an hour or so, but Kristi carried on as apparently the comedy vampire death at the end makes it all worth while.  Go figure.

Haven’t seen the footie yet (yay for Sky+ boxes; I get to spend Sunday morning vegged out watching Match of the Day), but I did read that Newcastle United won again :)  We must be safe from relegation now, and a good end to the season will improve spirits at the club ready for the next campaign.

I think I’m all set for Monday.  Part of me isn’t looking forward to the commute, but once I’ve settled into a routine and I’m able to work on the train, I’m sure it’ll just become a normal part of the day.  I’m really looking forward to starting the new job.  Working on secondment at the Ordnance Survey for the last few months reminded me just how much fun work can be when you’re working for the right sort of people and you’re encouraged to apply yourself to make a real difference.  In the last year, after years of a fairly stable life, I’ve lost three people to cancer.  Life is transitory, and if you’re just going through the motions every day, what’s the point?  That’s not living, it’s surviving.  That’s why I left my old job, because I want to get back to making a real difference, and I want to work for someone who demands that I do, rather than being afraid of me and looking to hold me back every opportunity going.  I wish everyone at Box UK well, and I hope they all achieve the success that they deserve.  But that chapter of my life is over now (well, almost; it’ll be over when basic paperwork like P45’s turn up), and I’m ready to take the next steps forward.

And if there isn’t anything in the area atm, and you’re interested in helping with a monthly meetup, I’d love to hear from you too.

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Mmm … Malvern.  Nice and hilly, tranquil, good places to stay, and close to friends - the perfect place to escape to for a short break.

Kristi and I went up to Malvern for a week’s holiday this Easter.  We didn’t have the best of the weather, but that was fine - we were both too knackered and too stressed to do anything much other than laze around.  But we did get lucky with the light on a couple of days

If you want to follow in our footsteps and holiday in Malvern, and you’re looking for a holiday cottage, I can’t recommend Rickyard Cottage enough.  We’ve been there a couple of times now, and each time it’s been a fantastic base for us.  We’ll be going back there again in the future.

Thoughts On The Photography

There are some places, such as the South Wales Valleys, where you can comfortably get away with taking photos in less than stunning light.  Not so Malvern.  If you’re going to take photos in and around Malvern, this Victorian spa town demands the very best light you have the patience to wait for.

I had the best luck taking photos in the town in the early morning, before 10am.  Malvern doesn’t seem to wake up before then, making it easy to get shots without having to wait too long for traffic and pedestrians to transit out of frame.

As for the hills themselves … I know all the professional landscape photographers would never consider plying their trade under the midday sun, but I believe that there’s a lot more to landscape photography than purple dawns and dusks.  The winter sun stays low throughout the day, ensuring plentiful shadows to break up the landscape and add both depth and interest.  A circular polariser and careful choice of direction really helps bring the best out of the washed-out skies.  And HDR adds depth and definition and ensures photos that bring an equal focus to both landscape and sky.

One of the highlights of the photography for me was visiting Little Malvern Priory.  I’ve lost count over how many times I’ve driven past it over the years, and I always said I’d come back one day with a camera.  I’ve finally notched that one up

The Photos

Here are the best photos from the week.  As always, click on each thumbnail to be taken to the larger version up on Flickr.